That $60 Craigslist score is the way to go, no question. I did almost the same thing two summers ago with a beat up dorm fridge, wired in a cheap computer fan from an old tower, and ran it at about 38 degrees for a 30 day ribeye. The salt tray trick works great, I used a small plastic container with pickling salt and water and it held right around 80 percent without me touching it. For the garage smell, I stuffed a bowl of baking soda in there plus a box of activated charcoal from the pet store, and it knocked it down a lot. My first batch without any of that smelled like a gym sock for a week, lesson learned. The nutty flavor after 30 days blew my mind compared to the cloth wrapped mess I used to make.

...and honestly @jesse_craig22 that works until you have like 47 cables that are all some shade of blue. Last week I spent ten minutes unplugging my router because my phone charger cord was the same color as the ethernet cable. My arm was numb before I found the right one. Now I just label everything with masking tape and a sharpie, but the tape falls off when it gets warm. So I've got little strips of tape stuck to the back of my desk that mean absolutely nothing at this point.